What have TV and the movies been trying to tell us about our city lately? Apparently, nothing nice—but also nothing new.
Jonathan Kiefer, Illustration by Jeremy Forson
If the tube or the multiplex were all you had to go on, you might think San Francisco has turned into Detroit or the Bronx. ABC’s new show Women’s Murder Club has combined a series of James Patterson bestsellers about a cop, a coroner, an assistant DA, and a reporter investigating homicides to create a hit suspense drama that takes place by the bay; and USA just renewed the popular dramedy Monk, about a local grief-wracked private detective who solves crimes through his own irrational phobias and obsessive-compulsiveness, for a seventh season.
The movie queue is also no walk in Golden Gate Park. Coming soon: a Brad Pitt remake of the adrenaline-fueled Steve McQueen muscle-car cop classic Bullitt, dueling biopics on slain city supervisor and gay-rights hero Harvey Milk—one from Superman Returns director Bryan Singer, and the other from Gus Van Sant, with Sean Penn in the title role—and Zebra Murders, with Jamie Foxx, for which NorCal-reared screenwriter Matthew Carnahan adapted former police chief Earl Sanders and Bennett Cohen’s book about a random race-baiting murder spree in the early ’70s. Plus, we’re still feeling the chill of David Fincher’s true-crime thriller Zodiac—whose famously exacting period details evoke those other cops-and-crime procedurals filmed in the ’60s and ’70s: the original Bullitt, Dirty Harry, and The Streets of San Francisco. As Fincher, who grew up in Marin, told the New York Times, “I have a handful of friends who were from Marin County at the same time, the same age group, and they’re all very kind of sinister, dark, sardonic people. And I wonder if Zodiac had something to do with that.”
Even directors better known for sunnier San Francisco stories are soon to embrace the city’s dark side. “I’ve been talking about doing a film about the true story of a Korean sex slave in the city, and also one about the goings-on at an infamous local strip club,” says filmmaker Wayne Wang, best known for his early-’90s feel-good film The Joy Luck Club. “I sometimes walk through the Tenderloin after dark and feel that anything can happen to me; lurking at night in the dark, there always has been that dangerous uncertainty in this city.”
So what’s this obsession with the seamy and malevolent about? Isn’t San Francisco a bastion of beauty and peace and progressive thought and summers of love and Sidney Poitier
coming to dinner?
To be sure, the entertainment of the ’80s and ’90s gave the city a glossy sheen. We all have a special place in our hearts for Wang’s Joy Luck Club, Mrs. Doubtfire, and that save-the-whales Star Trek movie. We all warmly remember curling up in front of the telly with the bucolic charms of—in rapidly descending order of importance—Tales of the City, Too Close for Comfort, and (admit it) Full House. We went through our phase of romantic-comedy revelry and weepy wallowing as early as the first years of the 21st century with The Wedding Planner and Sweet November, and we adore the unassailably homespun wholesomeness Pixar provides.
But the truth is, when it comes to film and TV depictions of this city, sweet and sunny is the exception, not the rule. The myth of San Francisco as an American utopia may still turn up in Visitors Bureau pamphlets, but reality must also account for what Nathaniel Rich described in his 2005 book, San Francisco Noir, as the “other San Francisco, where it’s always night, where the fog is thick with dread, and where no one ever dies—they only get murdered.”
How else would 1941 film-noir prototype The Maltese Falcon always stay in style? Why else would the eerily disorienting Vertigo have continued, since 1958, to merit repeated viewings? “You have to suppose that [Hitchcock] saw something ambivalent in the grace and romance of San Francisco,” local film critic David Thomson once wrote. “Such beauty; such a trap.”
“That’s a film about a haunted city, which goes on being haunted,” Thomson elaborates. “I think that beauty sometimes lends itself to the sinister. Hitchcock said if you want to see what this place really is, here is where to look.”
Hitch wasn’t the first to see the city in this light, however. The sinister beauty goes back at least to 1924, when Erich von Stroheim adapted Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague into the silent-film benchmark epic Greed. The story is simple: A San Francisco dentist marries his best friend’s cousin (and ex-lover); when she wins $5,000 in the lottery, envy corrodes the trio’s mutual kindness, with tragic results. Stroheim’s movie version is an unqualified classic, full of nuanced but archetypal characterization and elemental to the city’s early sense of itself. It set a moral precedent: In Greed’s strikingly unhappy ending,
the two former friends stumble into a bleached-out desert, shackled together and doomed, with a bloody pile of precious coins spilled between them. San Francisco may indeed be a promised land, but it has long been strewn with broken promises.
By 1935, a vision of the city as an isolated colony of avarice, corruption, and misanthropy had been firmly established in Barbary Coast. In this early outing by screenwriter Ben Hecht and director Howard Hawks, Miriam Hopkins plays a mail-order bride who arrives in 1850s San Francisco, only to discover that her fiancé has died mysteriously in the muddy, rowdy streets. A year later, in San Francisco, Spencer Tracy’s priest proclaims this “probably the wickedest, most corrupt, most godless city in America,” and Clark Gable’s secular hedonist has to get hit with the 1906 earthquake to find religion.
“I think it’s because San Francisco is the end of the continent,” says Bay Area–based novelist and screenwriter Barry Gifford, “like the end of the world.” Gifford, who wrote Wild at Heart and Lost Highway, sees a legacy of dramatic potential in the city’s foggy mystery and mischief. “It was always sort of an unknown quantity, an outpost,” he says. “And to some people, it still is.”
This grim, every-man-for-himself vision would continue for decades—all the way from Bogart’s cynical not-quite cop in The Maltese Falcon to James Stewart’s haunted, shell-shocked cop in Vertigo to Steve McQueen’s methodical, stone-faced cop in Bullitt (1968), Clint Eastwood’s iconic, Magnum-wielding vigilante cop in Dirty Harry (1971), and beyond. But it’s not just the police who fulfill the silver screen’s grand scheme of San Francisco criminal misery. Recall the grimy haze of paranoia in Francis Ford Coppola’s neglected masterpiece The Conversation (1974), in which Gene Hackman’s Watergate-era wire tapper becomes involved in a murder plot and goes nuts. Recall the cold, concrete labyrinth of unfinished BART tunnels through which Robert Duvall scrambled to freedom in George Lucas’s dystopic THX-1138 (1971).
So much for our promised land. And if you think mainstream movies and TV shows are gritty, try checking in with the city’s underground motion-picture artists.
“I’m not attracted to film noir, because that’s a stylized underworld. I’m more interested in the real thing,” says
longtime local filmmaker Rob Nilsson, whose 9 @ Night film series limns the inner life of the Tenderloin. “So I prowl the streets at night with our little crew, creating dramatic contexts where sometimes people participate unbidden, as part of an impulse to play, to reveal, or to unveil.” Nilsson, who generated his series of nine dramatic features through Tenderloin community workshops, finds inspiration in what he calls the city’s “underworld of the mind and soul” because, he says, it’s the only place left unmined here.
“San Francisco is the dream of every chamber of commerce in the land,” he adds. “Sure, we leave our heart there for the sweet memories conjured up, the romances, the epiphanies arrived at in ideal surroundings. But it’s all so perfect. What I want to capture is the uncertainty of a part of San Francisco most people fear.”
“If you want to look past the pretty shutters, everything eventually happens to everyone,” Nilsson adds. “There are just as many bloodstains on the antique carpets in Pacific Heights as there are on the cardboard littering Turk and Eddy.”
Jonathan Kiefer is the arts and culture editor and a film critic at the Sacramento News & Review.
